ExactTarget’s Fuel and the $1 Million Hackathon

The foundation of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is a platform called Fuel. Fuel enables developers to deeply integrate ExactTarget with other systems in a highly automated fashion. This is important because highly-targeted, relevant communication is as much a technology problem as it is a marketer's dilemma—the most successful marketing campaigns involve highly sophisticated interactions across multiple channels driven by data from multiple data sources tied to precise audience segments, delivering just the right message at just the right moment. Without Fuel, this level of sophistication simply wouldn't be possible.

My name is Ian Murdock, and I run the Platform product line at ExactTarget. As my team and I are gearing up for Dreamforce, I thought I’d take a few minutes and introduce ExactTarget and what we have in store for developers next week.

ExactTarget helps many of the world’s top brands connect with their customers through highly-targeted, relevant communication across email, mobile, social media, and the web. Our flagship product, the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, can be thought of as a “digital marketing operating system” that brings cross-channel marketing applications together in one place. The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud also provides a set of services that enable those applications to deeply integrate with each other through common messaging, calendaring, campaign management, and analytics frameworks.

The foundation of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is a platform called Fuel. Fuel enables developers to deeply integrate ExactTarget with other systems in a highly automated fashion. This is important because highly-targeted, relevant communication is as much a technology problem as it is a marketer’s dilemma—the most successful marketing campaigns involve highly sophisticated interactions across multiple channels driven by data from multiple data sources tied to precise audience segments, delivering just the right message at just the right moment. Without Fuel, this level of sophistication simply wouldn’t be possible.

Furthermore, Fuel enables our partners to build apps that extend the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud and make those apps available to our customers via HubExchange, the Marketing Cloud’s integrated app marketplace. This is important because, as we used to say at Sun, “innovation happens elsewhere”. No matter how large ExactTarget gets, no matter how smart we are, we cannot realistically hope to build every piece of technology needed to comprise a digital marketing system of record. Without Fuel, our customers would only have access to the Marketing Cloud’s native feature set.

So what do we have in store for developers next week? First of all, we’re going to have a big presence in the Dev Zone. Come by, get to know us, give us the opportunity to get to know you, and we’ll help you get started with ExactTarget Fuel.

Second, we have four breakout sessions related to ExactTarget Fuel. Attending one or more of these sessions is a great way to get up to speed on all ExactTarget Fuel has to offer:

Programming the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud (Mon., 11/18 1:45pm, Moscone Center West, Room 2007) will introduce you to basic Marketing Cloud concepts such as personalization and permission and get you started with the Fuel API.

There will be a repeat of the Programming the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud session in the Dev Zone theater on Weds., 11/20 at 3pm for those you can’t make the Monday session.

Finally, ExactTarget Fuel is one of the Salesforce Platform technologies you can use as part of the $1 million Dreamforce hackathon. If you’re interested in using Fuel in your app, you can read all about it and its technologies at Code@ExactTarget, our developer community. To get full access to the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud and ExactTarget Fuel, be sure to sign up for the Dreamforce Developer Edition, available exclusively for Dreamforce attendees starting this Sunday, 11/17.